Authors: Laura Anne Gilman
I grabbed the 1 train downtown, got off at 66th, and checked
into the nearest ’bux for my latte. The place was doing the usual midafternoon
traffic, so I grabbed the first empty chair I saw and sat back like I was just
another poser killing time before a date.
Once I was sure nobody was going to approach me, I let myself
relax a little, the outer awareness alert and upright while my core opened up
and went in search of all the tasty current it could sense shimmering
outside.
Compared to the faint hum of the wiring and overhead lights,
the generator a few blocks away was like a sauna, warm and inviting. The
temptation was there to slide into it and soak up all that was on offer, but
that would have been bad manners, not only to any other Talent looking to use
it, but for the folk whose rents paid for the power. “Take only what you need,
and not all from one source, Bonita,” I could hear J saying, like I was a
wide-eyed eight-year-old again.
The current swirling inside the generator was a dark, clean
blue, its lines sharp and delineated. Ask any five Talent what the colors meant,
and you’d get six different answers, but a sharp-edge meant it was fresh, that
there was no one else’s signature already on it, softening the feel. I’d never
been able to sense that, before becoming a PUP.
Lots of things I couldn’t do, before. We all were the type to
really look at things, not just accept what was on the surface; that was why
Stosser hired us in the first place, because we didn’t accept the first
impression as truth. But two years of doing this day in and out had put us on
another skill level entirely. The more you used, the more you could do. The
thought of what we might be able to do five years from now…
“Bonita?”
Oh, hell. I brought myself back to the Starbucks, keeping the
connection to the generator open, if narrowed, and looked to see who had
approached me, who knew me well enough to use my name, but not so well to use
the shorter version.
“Andrea. I didn’t know you slummed in public coffeehouses.”
The words were joking, the tone probably softer than I’d
intended, because Andrea took it for an invite, sitting on the windowsill next
to my table in lieu of an available chair.
Five foot ten, short blond hair, eyes the color of the Aegean
Sea, and teeth as white and straight as money could make them. Andrea was
Eastern Council, running at the same levels as my mentor used to.
Because of that, I was cautious about why she’d approached me.
I doubted she was just happy to see a familiar face; we’d flirted a bit back
when I was still living with J up in Boston, but she was in her thirties, and
I’d been twenty, and nothing more than a few innuendos had been exchanged.
And now…now I was a PUP and had to think about things like why
someone wanted to get to know me, rather than just enjoying their company. Even
the Council people who supported Stosser’s Great Experiment still saw us as
tools for them to use rather than the impartial clearinghouse we were trying to
become. So there was that.
“I heard that you were living in the city now, but I didn’t
think I’d run into you. I should have, of course. That’s how it works—you think
this is a huge place, but it’s really such a small town.” She leaned forward,
her blue silk blouse open just enough at the collar that I could see the swell
of her breasts and the gold chain that dropped between them, and part of my
brain kicked into a different gear. Apparently, being out of college meant I was
fair game now.
Huh. Andy was gorgeous, smart, ambitious, and potentially very
useful to me, long-term, if I were going to think the way she did. And I
was—modesty aside—smart, good-looking, and potentially very useful to her, both
short- and long-term, if she had any ambitions in the Council, which I knew damn
well she did. We would be, as the pundits like to say, a dream power couple.
And the sex would probably be a lot of fun.
There was just one damn problem. The Merge. Other than Pietr,
who knew what the deal was and where he stood, all of my sexual relations for
the past year had lasted two weeks, tops. Not that my sex drive had suddenly
gone away—far from it. It had just… I need to be emotionally engaged with the
person I’m sleeping with. Not love, but like-a-lot. And respect. And…
And every time I touched someone else, I knew that it wasn’t
enough. I wanted Venec. I wanted the spark-and-thump I got just touching him.
Wanted to know if his eyes were as intense when he hit orgasm as they were when
he was decoding an evidence tangle. Wanted…
I wanted him out of my head, out of my groin, and the last
lingering scent of him out of my core, because it was just the damn Merge, and I
did not like being directed by anything, least of all some obscure, magical
hand-of-fate.
But I knew, by now, that he wasn’t going anywhere. And neither
was I. It just… I wasn’t ready yet.
Andy touched my hand, her fingers soft and firm and smelling
like very expensive sin. “I have to get to a meeting—I’m already running
late—but can I ping you later, maybe have dinner?”
I didn’t want to encourage her if there was nothing
happening—I’m a flirt, not a tease—but Andy could be useful. And it wasn’t like
I wasn’t glad to have someone to exchange friendly innuendo with who knew the
rules and wasn’t interested in a lifetime of devotion. And having a Council
friend was never a bad thing, despite what my lonejack-raised coworkers
believed.
I tested my conscience and came back with a quick response.
“Sure. Ping me.”
I watched her leave, enjoying the view her knee-length pencil
skirt gave me, then brought myself back to the business at hand. My core hadn’t
quite topped off, but it was good enough. Time to get moving. Stosser would
expect me to have something to report, come morning.
Not an answer: even the Big Dog wasn’t that unreasonable. But a
little girl was missing, and finding out who took her was my job. No fucking
pressure, right.
I had a number of contacts among the fatae, both through my
mentor and my own social circles. Bobo, the Meshaden who acted as my occasional
bodyguard and gossip-bringer. Danny, the half-faun P.I. who did side work for us
occasionally and had connections into just about every shadowed corner of the
city. Madame, the Ancient dragon who lived in a penthouse cave high above the
cityscape and had her talon on the pulse of everything scandalous in the society
world, human and otherwise. But even as I ticked off names in my head, I knew
that if I wanted the most up-to-date details that other people wouldn’t want
known, if time was of the essence and cost not really an object, there was one
place to go and two people to talk to.
For various interpretations of “people,” anyway.
* * *
I didn’t have the patience to deal with the
stop-and-start motion of a cross-town bus, so I hailed a cab. Stosser would damn
well approve the expense, even if we were doing this pro bono.
Once upon a time, meeting up with The Wren had been a thing of
awe—after all, she was The Retriever, at least in the States—the most talented
(and Talented) of current-thieves. Then we’d become building-mates, and friends,
and I almost stopped thinking of her in a professional manner.
Almost. Not quite.
The past year or so, we’d lived in the same building—she’d
gotten me my apartment, in fact. But about a month ago, when the planned condo
conversion of our building fell through, she’d moved uptown. I didn’t blame
her—our building was cozy and had a sense of living energy in the actual
construction that made Talent feel comfortable, but it was also kinda cramped
and rundown, and her sweetie lived uptown anyway, so…
It wasn’t like we saw each other every day, anyway.
I gave the cabbie Wren’s new address and leaned against the
seat as the car jolted forward, moving into traffic. Pulling the file Stosser
had given me out of my bag, I opened the folder and studied the report in more
detail, putting aside what the Lord said and concentrating only on the
established facts. Kids sometimes went missing with no supernatural elements
involved, and I’d learned the hard way about not checking
every-damn-possibility. Especially if anything contradicted what the client gave
us. But the notes didn’t give me anything new, or even problematic. Parents
still married, so not a custody battle. No other relatives who might be
problems. Family decently middle-class, not the sort to be targeted for ransom.
Both parents worked in academia, teachers, so it’s not like there was the high
probability of coercion or blackmail, either, unless PTA meetings had gotten a
hell of a lot tougher since I was in school.
The cab dumped me out on the corner rather than fight the
delivery van double-parked and blocking traffic, and I walked the half block to
“The Westerly.” I had laughed when I saw the name on the formal, cream-colored
change-of-address card delivered in the mail a few weeks before. Seeing it,
though— J’s building was called Branderford. I wanted to live in a building that
had a name. And a doorman. And…
And, pointless. I couldn’t afford an apartment in a building
with a name and a doorman. Not yet, anyway.
Doormen in New York City are more than guys—or women—who open
doors and accept deliveries. They’re the first line of security for the
residents. So I was prepared to do the usual who-I’m-here-to-see routine—I was
assuming Wren, being Talent, would not have bought into one of those places with
the full electronic security systems. To my surprise, though, the doorman riding
the simple but splashy marble counter merely looked up, nodded, and pressed a
button, summoning the elevator. I let a slender tendril rise, and it was met by
a similar one from the doorman.
Huh. Not so much a surprise that the doorman was a Talent—we
tended to non-office jobs as a whole: less chance to current-spike the tech—but
that Wren had apparently put me on an all-clear list. I guess she was hoping I’d
still show up with lasagna every now and then.
The elevator was clean and well maintained, with pretty
architectural touches that said the building was a prewar renovation. My
estimate of how much she paid for the place went up, considerably. Ouch. But she
could afford it: you didn’t hire The Wren for cut-rate work.
The apartment was on the top floor—Wren liked not having anyone
thumping above her, considering the odd hours she slept. Twenty-four J was at
the end of the hallway, the fifth down, which meant she had a corner apartment.
My estimate of the cost went up, again. Damn.
The door opened even before I got there, and the moment I saw
two expectant faces, one brown-eyed and human, one red-eyed and ursine, staring
at me, I apologized. “No food this time, sorry. Will you take a rain check?”
It wasn’t as though I was such an amazing cook—they were just
that bad at it. I wasn’t sure Wren knew how to use her stove to do more than
reheat pizza, and the demon…
PB had agile paws, but his short, black-padded fingers ended in
sharp white nails that probably didn’t make it too easy to cook. Certainly I’d
never gotten any indication that he even had a kitchen, wherever he lived.
The first time I had seen the demon, it had been in an
all-night diner, during the ki-rin job. He had been the first demon I’d ever
encountered—maybe the only, since I still wasn’t sure if the angular shadow that
had passed me late one night had been a demon, despite the glimpse of pale red
eyes under its slouch hat. There were a lot of strange and dangerous things in
the
Cosa Nostradamus,
and a lot of them didn’t care
to be identified by humans.
My hosts let me in despite the lack of lasagna. I took a minute
to case the joint, noting that, as expected, Wren hadn’t done damn-all to
decorate and that she needed curtains for that wall of windows, no matter how
nice the view.
“Whatever it is, I didn’t do it,” Wren said, then added,
“probably.”
It was an old joke, or a year-old, anyway, which was as long as
I’d known the thief well enough to have jokes. Wren Valere was not only a
Retriever; to a lot of folk she was The Retriever. Like Pietr, she had the
ability to disappear from sight, slide through barriers, and sneak into anywhere
she wasn’t supposed to be, only unlike Pietr she’d gone for a life of… I
couldn’t exactly call it crime, since a lot of the jobs I knew she’d taken
involved reclaiming objects for their rightful owners. But she moved in a gray
area I tried not to look too deeply in. We were friends, and I wanted to keep it
that way.
Also, Wren and her partner, Sergei, and PB, had been
responsible for keeping the city from going down in flames earlier this year.
Everyone knew, even if nobody talked about it. Whatever forces had set us up to
war, she had taken them on and won.
No matter what side of the law you were on, you did not want
Wren Valere pissed at you. Thankfully, from the moment I’d met her, sent over by
Stosser to check into things when her apartment had been bugged by forces
unknown, we’d hit it off. Totally nonsexual—I have a useful sense for who’s off
the market, and Valere and her partner, Sergei, were like peanut and butter.
“Come on in,” Wren said, even though I had already gone well
past the door frame. She might have been ironic; it was tough to tell sometimes
with her. “Sit down. I think there’s furniture somewhere under all the boxes.
You want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
I found a space on the dark green sofa, which was definitely
new. Wren’s old place had a sort of bedraggled assortment of furniture, like
she’d never quite thought about the fact that guests would need a place to sit.
This… I sensed PB’s paw in this.
PB found a footstool under a garbage bag that looked like it
was filled with pillows, and perched himself on top, tossing the bag onto the
polished hardwood floor. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me, his rounded,
white-furred ears twitching ever so slightly, like a radarscope listening for
something human ears would miss.